You’ve probably already heard of marketing automation but you don’t have a very clear idea?
That’s great because I’m here to share with you my first impressions of this software platform, a week ago just like you I did not have a clear idea … We will see together the return of a consultant of his first steps on Marketo.

Marketo is a business solution that improves the productivity of marketing teams by following and stimulating the prospect during his buying process according to preconceived scenarios. My introduction to marketing automation was done through the Marketo software thanks to the Quick Start Marketo offer from Merlin/Leonard.

You are also wondering what is the Quick Start Marketo, as its name indicates, it is a quick way to master the Marketo software in a few days … In summary this training provides the main key actions to carry out to automate marketing actions effectively and gives the teams the advantage of being operational in a few days on the tool.

I had the chance to attend this workshop session animated by Sylvain Davril – holder of the Digital Marketing offers of Merlin/Leonard – and the marketing team of one of the biggest companies present on the market of the computerized management software for the financial markets.

Day 1: Strategic thinking stage

The first day of the training was not easy, we started by creating the “framework” of the tool, this step is crucial because it will support the process of future campaigns for better qualification of leads and personalized content for better engagement:

• Import of the initial lead base
• Setting up CNAMES (allowing for go.com type landing pages)
• Organization and visibility parameters
• Email deliverability

The ideas started to flow from the marketing teams on “how to best optimize their use of Marketo?“. Sylvain advised them on the different possibilities that were available to them.

Day 2: After the effort the comfort: the creative stage

After having thought about the programs to set up for the different campaigns, we tackled the more operational and creative part such as the creation of forms, emails and landing pages necessary to communicate with the leads.

Design Studio in Marketo offers a wide range of possibilities to customize in real time and to the taste of each one of these programs.

Day 3: Let’s calculate the impact of our actions: The ROI!

We all know the importance of the famous “Return On Investment” and the difficulty of determining it with accuracy without forgetting the laborious tasks of “reporting” to achieve this objective.

During this stage of the training we saw how to measure the impact of the client’s investments very easily. I was very pleasantly surprised to see the complex analyses that could be easily extracted from the tool without having to spend hours manipulating data in Excel. The client was equally delighted by the considerable time savings and by the fact that it gave them the possibility to optimize all their marketing actions in real time.

Day 4: Application: On your marks, get set, go!

Now we just need to connect with our prospects, this last day of training allowed the client to create the main communication action that the marketing team needed for its next months.

The client chose to model for their first campaign their upcoming event in Singapore, which lasts 5 days and contains several public and private keynotes for which they need to manage registrations, reminders and pre-event notifications.

Day 5: Scoring and Lead Life Cycle

How to reach our sales objectives? Scoring is very important if you want to target the right prospects. It is a method to classify them according to their behavior.

We therefore set up the scoring according to the marketing team’s strategy to obtain the prospect’s degree of commitment.

This degree of commitment defined by a score allows the team to prioritize and allocate their main resources to the target with the highest score. The latter is considered in the language of marketing automation as a “hot lead“.

We then determined the lead life cycle by integrating them into a predefined circuit with the goal of converting them; moving throughout the process from a “cold lead” to a “hot lead“.

Are you interested in setting up a Marketing Automation platform?

But by the way, why Marketo?